• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.703-710
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• 2010

In this study, a tactile stimulator was developed to resolve some problems from the previous version of the system such as system configuration, inappropriate stimulation control and additional problems. The developed tactile stimulator consists of control unit, drive unit and vibrator unit. The control unit was controlled by E-Prime software to generate appropriate vibration pulses. The drive unit supplies enough energy to the vibrator to generate effective stimulation pulses. The vibrator unit consists of small coin type vibrator and velcro, and was made to be attached at the hand easily. The developed tactile stimulator was designed by small-size, light-weight, low-power, simple-fabrication, max 35 channels and little delay time from instruction signal of E-Prime software to vibrator. The duration and magnitude of stimulation was controlled by 10 grades and the problems concerning stimulation control were compensated by wideband frequency ranges. Additionally, the electrical safety was ensured by low voltage operation. Vibrator was made to be attached on finger as well as on any part of the subject. Since this tactile stimulator is developed based on E-Prime software which is widely used in cognitive science, it is believed that this stimulator be suitable for the wide application of cognitive science study.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.94-100
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• 2011

Purpose: Basal/Acetazolamide-challenged brain perfusion SPECT is very useful to assess cerebral perfusion and vascular reserve. However, as there is a trade off between sensitivity and spatial resolution in the selection of collimator, the selection of optimal collimator is crucial. In this study, we examined three collimators to select optimal one for 1-day brain perfusion SPECT. Materials and Methods: Three collimators, low energy high resolution-parallel beam (LEHR-par), ultra resolution-fan beam (LEUR-fan) and super fine-fan beam (LESFR-fan), were tested for 1-day imaging using Triad XLT 9 (TRIONIX). The SPECT images of Hoffman 3D brain phantom filled with 99mTc of 170 MBq and a normal volunteer were acquired with a protocol of 50 kcts/frame and detector rotation of 3 degree. Filterd backprojection (FBP) reconstruction with Butterworth filter (cut off frequencies, 0.3 to 0.5) was performed. The quantitative and qualitative assessments for three collimators were performed. Results: The blind tests showed that LESFR-fan provided the best image quality for Hoffman brain phantom and the volunteer. However, images for all the collimator were evaluated as 'acceptable'. On the other hand, in order to meet the equivalent signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), total acquisition time or radioactivity dose for LESFR-fan must have been increased up to almost twice of that for LEUR-fan and LEHR-par. The volunteer test indicated that total acquisition time could be reduced approximately by 10 to 14 min in clinical practice using LEUR-fan and LEHR-par without significant loss on image quality, in comparison with LESFR-fan. Conclusion: Although LESFR-fan provides the best image quality, it requires significantly more acquisition time than LEUR-fan and LEHR-par to provide reasonable SNR. Since there is no significant clinical difference between three collimators, LEUR-fan and LEHR-par can be recommended as optimal collimators for 1-day brain perfusion imaging with respect to image quality and SNR.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.101-112
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• 2015

A type of cell junction that is formed between different parts within the same cell is called autotypic cell junction. Autotypic junction proteins form tight junctions found between membrane lamellae of a cell, especially in myelinating glial cells. Some of them have postsynaptic density-95/disks large/zonula occludens-1 (PDZ) domains, which interact with the carboxyl (C)-terminal PDZ-binding motif of other proteins. PDZ domains are protein-protein interaction modules that play a role in protein complex assembly. The PDZ domain, which is widespread in bacteria, plants, yeast, metazoans, and Drosophila, allows the assembly of large multi-protein complexes. The multi-protein complexes act in intracellular signal transduction, protein targeting, and membrane polarization. The identified PDZ domain-containing proteins located at autotypic junctions include zonula occludens-1 (ZO-1), ZO-2, pals-1-associated tight junction protein (PATJ), multi-PDZ domain proteins (MUPPs), membrane-associated guanylate kinase inverted 2 (MAGI2), and protease-activated receptor (PAR)-3. PAR-3 interacts with atypical protein kinase C and PAR-6, forming a ternary complex, which plays an important role in the regulation of cell polarity. MAGI2 interacts with ${\alpha}$-amino-3-hydroxyl-5-methyl-4-isoxazole propionate (AMPA) receptor at excitatory synapses. PATJ is detected in paranodal loops associated with claudin-1. On the other hand, MUPP1 is found in mesaxons and Schmidt-Lanterman incisures with claudin-5. ZO-1, ZO-2, and PAR-3 are found at all three sites. Different distributions of PDZ domain-containing proteins affect the development of autotypic junctions. In this review, we will describe PDZ domain-containing proteins at autotypic tight junctions in myelinating Schwann cells and their roles.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Inherited Metabolic disease
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.14-22
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• 2012

Objectives: This study was performed to review clinical manifestations of hyperphenylalaninemia patients in Korean. Methods: 178 cases of hyperphenyalaninemia were diagnosed at department of pediatrics, Soonchunhyang University Hospital from January, 1983 to August. We reviewed DNA analysis, MR imaging, EEG, radiography of the left hand and wrist, bone densitometry (BMD), IQ test of hyperphenyalaninemia patients. Results: Out of 178 cases, 161 cases were diagnosed classic phenylketonuria and 17 cases were diagnosed BH4 deficiency. 122 cases performed DNA analysis. R243Q (10.3%), Y204C (9.9%), and IVS4-1G>A (8.1%) mutations were predominant. 22 cases underwent MR imaging. Varying degrees of symmetrical high signal intensity were noted on T2-weighted sequences in the periventricular deep white matter of 15 cases. 23 cases were performed EEG. 12 cases (52.3%) showed abnormal pattern. EEG abnormalities showed in 11 cases. On lumbar BMD four of 11 cases (36%) showed reduced bone density of more than 1 S.D. in four of 11 cases, bone age was less than chronological age by at least one year. 18 cases were performed IQ test. Mean IQ scores was $84{\pm}21.6$. Among older than 15 years (9 cases), Mean IQ scores was $72{\pm}21.2$. PTPS deficiency was 14 cases, DHPR deficiency was 2 cases, and GTPCH deficiency was 1 case. Conclusion: We confirmed there were varieties of DNA mutations. And MR imaging and EEG were nonspecific in PKU patients. Older children showed lower IQ score. Low phenylalanine diet prevents brain damage in PKU patient. Not only first few years of life but also lifetime, Keeping low phenylalanine diet is important.

• The Sea:JOURNAL OF THE KOREAN SOCIETY OF OCEANOGRAPHY
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.49-57
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• 2016

Even if an external forcing that will drive a climate change is given uniformly over the globe, the corresponding climate change and the feedbacks by the climate system differ by region. Thus the detection of global warming signal has been made on a regional scale as well as on a global average against the internal variabilities and other noises involved in the climate change. The purpose of this study is to estimate a timing of unprecedented climate due to global warming and to analyze the regional differences in the estimated results. For this purpose, unlike previous studies that used climate simulation data, we used an observational dataset to estimate a magnitude of internal variability and a future temperature change. We calculated a linear trend in surface temperature using a historical temperature record from 1880 to 2014 and a magnitude of internal variability as the largest temperature displacement from the linear trend. A timing of unprecedented climate was defined as the first year when a predicted minimum temperature exceeds the maximum temperature record in a historical data and remains as such since then. Presumed that the linear trend and the maximum displacement will be maintained in the future, an unprecedented climate over the land would come within 200 years from now in the western area of Africa, the low latitudes including India and the southern part of Arabian Peninsula in Eurasia, the high latitudes including Greenland and the mid-western part of Canada in North America, the low latitudes including Amazon in South America, the areas surrounding the Ross Sea in Antarctica, and parts of East Asia including Korean Peninsula. On the other hand, an unprecedented climate would come later after 400 years in the high latitudes of Eurasia including the northern Europe, the middle and southern parts of North America including the U.S.A. and Mexico. For the ocean, an unprecedented climate would come within 200 years over the Indian Ocean, the middle latitudes of the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic, parts of the Southern Ocean, the Antarctic Ross Sea, and parts of the Arctic Sea. In the meantime, an unprecedented climate would come even after thousands of years over some other regions of ocean including the eastern tropical Pacific and the North Pacific middle latitudes where an internal variability is large. In summary, spatial pattern in timing of unprecedented climate are different for each continent. For the ocean, it is highly affected by large internal variability except for the high-latitude regions with a significant warming trend. As such, a timing of an unprecedented climate would not be uniform over the globe but considerably different by region. Our results suggest that it is necessary to consider an internal variability as well as a regional warming rate when planning a climate change mitigation and adaption policy.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.100-107
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• 2003

Purpose : To assess the usefulness of cardiac MR imaging (MRI) in the diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction and in the assessment of myocardial viability in comparision with T1-201 SPECT. Materials and Methods : We retrospectively studied 17 patients who complained of chest pain and dyspnea with cardiac MRI . The patients were evaluated for the presence or absence of high signal intensity on T2-weighted image (T2wI), abnormal wall motion on 2D-FIESTA, perfusion defect on Gd-DTPA enhanced T1WI, and delayed myocardial enhancement on 15-minutes delay Gd-DTPA enhanced T1WI. The results were correlated with the images on T1-201 SPECT, taken at rest and stress, through which reversibility of perfusion defect was assessed. Results : Both cardiac MRI and T1-201 SPECT proved to be useful methods for diagnosing acute myocardial infarction. In order of decreasing correspondence, T2WI, T1-201 SPECT, delayed enhancement study, and wall motion images all showed significant statistical correlation with the clinical diagnosis of myocardial infarction. Perfusion MRI, on the other hand, showed no significant statistical difference was found between T1-201 SPECT and cardiac MRI. The results on T2WI showed high accordance with those on Tl-201 SPECT, while delayed myocardial enhancement and wall motion studies showed no agreement with Tl-201 SPECT. Conclusion : Cardiac MRI is useful method for diagnosis of acute myocardiac infarction. With respect to the assessment of myocardial viability, the results obtained on cardiac MRI showed high agreement with those on Tl-201 SPECT. However, further study is necessary at this point for standardization and establishment of the methods for assessing myocardial viability on cardiac MRI.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.781-788
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• 2021

Due to the high sensitivity to radiation, excessive exposure needs to be prevented by accurately measuring the dose irradiated to the skin during radiation therapy. Although clinical trials use dosimeters such as film, OSLD, TLD, glass dosimeter, etc. to measure skin dose, these dosimeters have difficulty in accurate dosimetry on skin curves. In this study, to solve these problems, we developed a skin dosimeter that can be attached according to human flexion and evaluated its response characteristics. For the manufacture of the dosimeter, lead oxide (PbO) with high atomic number (Z_Pb: 82, Z_O: 8) and density (9.53 g/cm³) and silicon binders that can bend according to human flexion were used. In the case of a dosimeter made of PbO material, the performance degradation has been prevented by using parylene and others due to the presence of degradation due to oxidation, but the previously used parylene is affected by bending, so a new form of passive layer was produced and applied to the skin dosimeter. The characteristic evaluation of the skin dosimeter was evaluated by analyzing SEM, reproducibility, and linearity. Through SEM analysis, bending was evaluated, reproducibility and linearity at 6 MeV energy were evaluated, and applicability was assessed with a skin dosimeter. As a result of observing the dosimeter surface through SEM analysis, the parylene passive layer PbO dosimeter with the positive layer raised to the parylene produced cracks on the surface when bent. On the other hand, no crack was observed in the silicon passive layer PbO dosimeter, which was raised to silicon passive layer. In the reproducibility measurement results, the RSD of the silicon passive layer PbO dosimeter was 1.47% which satisfied the evaluation criteria RSD 1.5% and the linearity evaluation results showed the R² value of 0.9990, which satisfied the evaluation criteria R² 9990. The silicon passive layer PbO dosimeter was evaluated to be applicable to skin dosimeters by demonstrating high signal stability, precision, and accuracy in reproducibility and linearity, without cracking due to bending.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.30 no.12
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• pp.1092-1100
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• 2020

The six-transmembrane epithelial antigen of prostate 4 (Steap4) is a metalloreductase that plays a role in intracellular iron and cupper homeostasis, inflammatory response, and glucose and lipid metabolism. Previously, Steap4 has been reported to stimulate adipocyte differentiation; however, the underlying mechanisms of this action remain unexplored. In the present study, we investigated the molecular mechanisms involved in Steap4-induced adipocyte differentiation using 3T3-L1 cells, immortalized brown adipocyte (iBA) cells, and mouse embryonic fibroblast C3H10T1/2 cells. The knockdown of Steap4 using adenovirus-containing shRNA attenuated mitotic clonal expansion (MCE), as evidenced by the impaired proliferation of 3T3-L1 cells, iBA cells, and C3H10T1/2 cells within 48 hr after adding the differentiation medium. Steap4 knockdown downregulated G1/S phase transition-related cell cycle regulators (including cyclin A and cyclin D) and upregulated cell cycle inhibitors (including p21 and p27). Furthermore, Steap4 knockdown inhibited the phosphorylation of p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase, extracellular signal-regulated kinase, and Akt. Moreover, Steap4 knockdown repressed the expression of early adipogenic activators, such as CCAAT-enhancer-binding protein β (C/EBPβ) and Kruppel-like factor family factor 4 (KLF4). On the other hand, Steap4 knockdown stimulated the expression of adipogenic inhibitors, including KLF2, KLF3, and GATA2. The overexpression of Steap4 using an adenovirus removed the repressive histone marks H3K9me2 and H3K9me3 on the promoter of C/EBPβ. These results indicate that Stepa4 stimulates adipocyte differentiation through the induction of MCE and the modulation of early adipogenic transcription factors, including C/EBPβ, during the early phase of adipocyte differentiation.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.145-154
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• 2022

Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) technology is emerging as a core technology of Future Combat Systems (FCS). Conventional ATR is performed based on IMINT (image information) collected from the SAR sensor, and various image-based deep learning models are used. However, with the development of IT and sensing technology, even though data/information related to ATR is expanding to HUMINT (human information) and SIGINT (signal information), ATR still contains image oriented IMINT data only is being used. In complex and diversified battlefield situations, it is difficult to guarantee high-level ATR accuracy and generalization performance with image data alone. Therefore, we propose a knowledge graph-based ATR method that can utilize image and text data simultaneously in this paper. The main idea of the knowledge graph and deep model-based ATR method is to convert the ATR image and text into graphs according to the characteristics of each data, align it to the knowledge graph, and connect the heterogeneous ATR data through the knowledge graph. In order to convert the ATR image into a graph, an object-tag graph consisting of object tags as nodes is generated from the image by using the pre-trained image object recognition model and the vocabulary of the knowledge graph. On the other hand, the ATR text uses the pre-trained language model, TF-IDF, co-occurrence word graph, and the vocabulary of knowledge graph to generate a word graph composed of nodes with key vocabulary for the ATR. The generated two types of graphs are connected to the knowledge graph using the entity alignment model for improvement of the ATR performance from images and texts. To prove the superiority of the proposed method, 227 documents from web documents and 61,714 RDF triples from dbpedia were collected, and comparison experiments were performed on precision, recall, and f1-score in a perspective of the entity alignment..

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.102-109
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• 2009

Purpose: Flash 3D (pixon(R) method; 3D OSEM) was developed as a software program to shorten exam time and improve image quality through reconstruction, it is an image processing method that usefully be applied to nuclear medicine tomography. If perfoming brain diamox perfusion scan by reconstructing subtracted images by Flash 3D with shortened image acquisition time, there was a problem that SNR of subtracted image is lower than basal image. To increase SNR of subtracted image, we use LEAP collimators, and we emphasized on sensitivity of vessel dilatation than resolution of brain vessel. In this study, our purpose is to confirm possibility of application of LEAP collimators at brain diamox perfusion tomography, identify proper reconstruction factors by using Flash 3D. Materials and methods: (1) The evaluation of phantom: We used Hoffman 3D Brain Phantom with $^{99m}Tc$. We obtained images by LEAP and LEHR collimators (diamox image) and after 6 hours (the half life of $^{99m}Tc$: 6 hours), we use obtained second image (basal image) by same method. Also, we acquired SNR and ratio of white matters/gray matters of each basal image and subtracted image. (2) The evaluation of patient's image: We quantitatively analyzed patients who were examined by LEAP collimators then was classified as a normal group and who were examined by LEHR collimators then was classified as a normal group from 2008. 05 to 2009. 01. We evaluate the results from phantom by substituting factors. We used one-day protocol and injected $^{99m}Tc$-ECD 925 MBq at both basal image acquisition and diamox image acquisition. Results: (1) The evaluation of phantom: After measuring counts from each detector, at basal image 41~46 kcount, stress image 79~90 kcount, subtraction image 40~47 kcount were detected. LEAP was about 102~113 kcount at basal image, 188~210 kcount at stress image and 94~103 at subtraction image kcount were detected. The SNR of LEHR subtraction image was decreased than LEHR basal image about 37%, the SNR of LEAP subtraction image was decreased than LEAP basal image about 17%. The ratio of gray matter versus white matter is 2.2:1 at LEHR basal image and 1.9:1 at subtraction, and at LEAP basal image was 2.4:1 and subtraction image was 2:1. (2) The evaluation of patient's image: the counts acquired by LEHR collimators are about 40~60 kcounts at basal image, and 80~100 kcount at stress image. It was proper to set FWHM as 7 mm at basal and stress image and 11mm at subtraction image. LEAP was about 80~100 kcount at basal image and 180~200 kcount at stress image. LEAP images could reduce blurring by setting FWHM as 5 mm at basal and stress images and 7 mm at subtraction image. At basal and stress image, LEHR image was superior than LEAP image. But in case of subtraction image like a phantom experiment, it showed rough image because SNR of LEHR image was decreased. On the other hand, in case of subtraction LEAP image was better than LEHR image in SNR and sensitivity. In all LEHR and LEAP collimator images, proper subset and iteration frequency was 8 times. Conclusions: We could archive more clear and high SNR subtraction image by using proper filter with LEAP collimator. In case of applying one day protocol and reconstructing by Flash 3D, we could consider application of LEAP collimator to acquire better subtraction image.